Thomm Quackenbush Quotes

My life of sin among people I’m sure he thinks are deviants is happier and more honest that his oppressive, sexist cesspool.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

A college provides a means of accrediting and laundering one’s existence, so that what was may be forgotten under the weight of something far more mundane.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Love and poor parenting are acceptable topics for any formal meal I make.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

They had perfected their team nagging to a level where they no longer had to confer and felt they would be wasting their talents if they only admonished their own children.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Now, it’s been a while since I had to tell this, so a few of the finer points may not connect as well as they should, but the story will bear the weight. That’s the beauty of the truth: put all together, it makes sense even if the parts might not.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Opening her mouth to take a bite seemed forward. Chewing? Obscene. Mutual mastication was out of the question.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

She sat in the silence that resulted in the absence of her words, feeling unburdened but not absolved.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Pagans can be just as monstrous as any other group. They can be murderers, rapists, pedophiles. We need to accept that they are our problem and deal with them. We need to speak against their crimes and challenge them rather than letting our silence make us complicit.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

No divinity worth His salt could be contained in a book.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Think about the whole Biblical story of Mary. She wakes up and sees something with a lion, eagle, and human face that wants to inseminate her with the Holy Seed. She’s practically a saint just for not killing herself on the spot.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

My soul is not satisfied with an inert universe. The gods may not make a habit of speaking to me personally, but I can't help but whisper comments to them.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

She resented a universe that forced her to fabricate cover stories for its more inexplicable vagaries.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

She had picked up life where she had left off... and hoped that would be enough to get the universe to politely overlook her.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

She could not keep his death in her head, like when she tried to imagine the infiniteness of the universe and nearly swooned at the vastness of the thought.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

In the pause that followed, Shane understood why people said their hearts broke. She always thought it was a weak metaphor of strong emotion. She could feel each bit of shrapnel from her heart stab at her stomach and lungs. Her knees gave out beneath her as she heard the voice tell her what she already knew in her fragments of cardiac tissue.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

My characters will happily march off a cliff if it is in them to do so, but may the gods help me if I write that the character is an alcoholic when they are not. They will fight me at every turn and it is their domain. A writer cannot win against a stubborn character.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

The UFOs were explicable enough, just experimental aircrafts from the airport. Of course the government was not going to tell people what was actually going on. She would not be surprised if the government encouraged the UFO cultists to flock there as the perfect cover, since no one would ever believe them.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

It is a challenge to love someone who does not see the divine as you do, and much harder still to date someone who considers your spirituality a design flaw in an otherwise worthwhile human being.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

[H]er retaliation only made the sin the greater because she could not find words to confess.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

I don’t much care for all this talk of God washing away all my dirt. I like a bit of grit around the edges. It gives me character and does a passable job of faking depth, from a distance.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Were genuine aliens to find us… the chances were fairly good they would appear in a form beyond reckoning, shaped by the requirements of their environment. It was only for the convenience of the costume department of Star Trek that people believed in humanoid aliens.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

The dark places will not be instinctively frightening, true, but isn’t it better that children fear boogeymen than pedophiles? Isn’t it better that libraries are filled to the brim with stories and not only words?

~ Thomm Quackenbush

The nature of God's plan can be difficult to fathom when you are toiling in some small corner of it, but it is glorious from above, if you allow yourself the perspective.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

I don’t think very many people get converted by someone telling them they are terrible. No one I’d want to rub shoulders with in Heaven, anyway.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

To have the experience I did as a child, I would have to be a physically different being, one with whom I share nearly nothing. On a cellular level, aside from the neurons of my cerebral cortex and a few other stranglers in my heart and eyes, I am not him.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Keep to the 'I-statements' and discuss your feelings, she lectured herself. I think, I feel. Don't be accusatory. Don't tell him that he is an insecure prick who should back off before you deck him. Instead, say, 'I feel you are acting like an insecure prick who should back off before I deck you.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Being a novelist is not the sort of thing we can shut off. It infests every bit of us until we lose the boundary between Person and Writer, like one of those color charts where it is impossible to say where the blue stops and the red begins.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

I missed you,” she cried into him. Standing on top of the snow gave him an additional few inches on her and she rested her head against his chest. She could hear nothing within, just her own heartbeat echoing.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

I am copacetic with leaning on the sacred, but I need to make sure all the mundane bases are covered before we break out the crystals and incense for a good chant.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

I don't think I'm being harassed by little green stalkers. I don't know what's really going on, but I'd rather try to eliminate all rational excuses before blaming intergalactic monkeys from the fourth dimension who are somehow interested in this really boring town.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Reason had no place to crash once Emotion came to town.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Having in our childhood felt primal awe for the spectacle of the holiday, we are told to age into feeling sullen and resentful. You are supposed to proclaim Santa dead like preadolescent Nietzsches and decry the whole month as an orgy of crass commercialism.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

She harbored the childhood presumption that the truly scary things could only find her in the night.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Americans bred like rabbits, expecting the reaper to slaughter at least a few before they reached ripeness.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

American culture enforces such rigid gender roles for male friendships that they are gay unless they materially resemble a beer commercial.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Even putting aside the culturally indoctrinated terror that someone in America will assume that two men engage in sodomy behind barely closed doors, there simply isn't an elegant way of asking someone of your gender to hang out for the first time.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

They tell me how they are not scared to die, but they are terrified of the lives circumstance forces them to lead.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Isn’t Santa just a stand in for the society that has locked them up for formative years? Something that watches and judges, telling them that they got what they deserved based on their behavior? Surely they have to have noticed that Saint Nick, like the judicial system itself, tends to look more favorably upon rich children. He is fat, white, past middle age, and holds all the cards.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

If you do not need something that it is still useful, give it to someone who will appreciate it before you douse it in lighter fluid in hopes Santa Odin will put a new one under your Yule tree.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

He seemed like the sort to have a vast arsenal of smirks, shaped over a decade of nonverbal conversation.

~ Thomm Quackenbush